Is The Statesman DTF? An Investigation

We at UTB were feeling the love on Valentine's Day and decided to send our favorite publication, The Statesman, a love letter through the DP. For years now, we've had kind of a crush on The Statesman. After all, they are on the RIGHT side of the story. We decided it was time to make the first move. Below is our flirtatious first encounter.

Our hearts pounding, we awaited their response.

At first, we were puzzled. Our crush made a seemingly-arbitrary comment about the US economy while we were trying to hit on them, perplexing even our most seasoned romantics. We paced the room for a while, and eventually called our friends for help decoding the message. We asked Street for advice and, while they weren't sure what The Statesman meant, they offered us words of encouragement and assured us that we are strong and beautiful. We called the DP, whose leadership didn't care.

We decided to look into the matter ourselves, deferring to the vast amounts of information provided by the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database. This is what we found.Please note: we reflected the line over the X axis so as to show the relative "up-ness" or "down-ness" of the deficit.

The graph above shows that the deficit has been trending down since the Great Recession, so we're forced to reached the crushing conclusion that The Statesman is not DTF. Nothing says rejection like a "no" response to a "you up?" text. It feels like we just keep looking for love in all the wrong places.

But we might still have a chance. If you cherrypick the data and say that the deficit is, in fact, up due to the increase from 2015 to 2016, ignoring the longer-term trend, the Statesman may have been interested after all! Or, at least interested enough for a one night stand (missionary only, we presume).